Chapter 8

She sat crying most bitterly; and then, when at last she dried her eyes, and went down-stairs to gratify Mary by pretending to eat some breakfast, a supremely commonplace and yet poignantly sad reflection brought another flood of tears. What wretched little chances can produce the most tragically terrific upheavals! Had she not bought a return railway ticket, the whole disaster might have been averted. But for that horrible square inch of pink cardboard, all would have been well, her ordeal would not have been suffered in vain. The wickedly strong intoxicant had of course begun the mischief by making her blurt out those imbecile words that first set Will on the rampage; but it was the knowledge of the telltale ticket, close at hand, unguarded, certain to be found if looked for, that had unnerved her so completely. Otherwise, as she now believed, she could have held her own under his rapid fire of questions. She could have laughed off his accusations as absurd--or, at the worst, she could have gained time to think of plausible explanations. But the ticket simply paralyzed her.

And she had known that she was running a risk when she made up her mind to keep it. She bought it without any thought at all--a stupid thing to do, considering that the cost was the same as two single fares. Not so stupid, however, as the thrifty idea that if she and Will traveled home in different trains, she might after all use her return half. Oh, fatal economy! In scheming to avoid the loss of five shillings she had wrecked all her peace and comfort.

On this Sunday she would have liked to go to church, but a dread of loquacious and inquisitive neighbors kept her a prisoner in the house.

On Monday morning she almost determined to go out for a walk but her courage again failed her. Until noon the village street was dull and lifeless, with only one or two people visible at a time, and yet she dared not go down and walk through it. Were she to show herself, all the idle shopkeepers would issue from their shops, to congratulate her on the postmaster's victory, to inquire where he was spending his holiday and why she hadn't gone for the holiday with him.

Nearly all day she sat by the window of the front room, staring at the trite and familiar scene, and encouraging her thoughts to wander away from her misery whenever they would consent to do so. A butcher's boy leaned his bicycle against the curbstone in so careless a fashion that it immediately fell down; Mr. Bates the corn merchant passed by with an empty wagon; then Mr. Norton the vicar appeared, going from house to house, distributing handbills of special services. And she wondered if he and his wife had ever had a hidden domestic storm in their outwardly tranquil existence. Mrs. Norton must have been quite pretty once, and perhaps at that period she caused Mr. Norton anxieties. But if she had ever needed forgiveness for some indiscretion or other, she had obviously obtained it; and again the thought came strong and clear that people who hold conspicuous positions--such as vicars, tax-collectors, postmasters, and so on--owe a duty to the world as well as to themselves. They must hush things up, and preserve appearances: they can not wash their dirty linen in public.

After twelve o'clock there was much more to look at. The children came shouting out of school, laborers passed to and fro on their way to dinner, and with horns loudly blowing, three heavily-laden chars-a-bancs arrived one after another from Rodhaven. The tourists filled the street, and for about two hours the aspect of things was lively and bustling. Then the horns sounded again, the huge vehicles lumbered away, and the whole village relapsed into drowsiness and inertia. Literally nothing to look at now.

But before tea time that afternoon she saw something in the street that held her breathlessly attentive as long as it remained there. It was Mr. Barradine, riding slowly toward her between the churchyard and the Roebuck stables. She shrank back behind the muslin curtain of her window, and, watching him, passed through an extraordinarily rapid sequence of emotions.

The horse was a chestnut, and it stepped lightly and springily. As she thought of how and when she had last seen its rider, she felt a sensation that was like helplessness, shame, and fear all mingled. It was as though her whole body, muscles, flesh and nerves, quailed and grew weak at the mere sight of him; as though inherited instincts were controlling her, and would always control her whenever she was in his presence; as though she the descendant of serfs must infallibly submit to the descendant of lords--must forever fear the man who had been her master even when he was her lover. Rationally she hated him for the harm that he had done her, but instinctively she feared him for the further harm that he might yet have power to do.

And together with the hatred and the fear, there was a pitiful sneaking admiration. He looked so grand and unruffled--so old, and yet sitting the skittish, high-mettled horse so firmly; so feeble, and yet full of such an absolute confidence in his power to rule and subordinate, accustomed for forty years to the unfailing subjection of such things as servants, horses, and women. Her heart bumped against her stays, and her face became red and then white, when she thought that he intended to stop at the post office and ask for her. But he rode on--gave one glance up toward the windows from which she shrank still further, and rode by, right down the street, with the horse swishing its long tail and seeming to dance in a light amble.

Then, as soon as he disappeared, the spell was broken.

In all that she had confessed to her husband she had been sincere; but hers was a simple and easy going nature, and exaltation could not be long sustained. After excitement she returned rapidly to a passive and unimaginative level; and now, quietly brooding, she could not do otherwise than justify herself for all that had happened.

At the end of everything she felt a deep-seated conviction that she was in truth blameless. She was not a bad woman. Therefore it would be wicked to treat her as a sinner and an outcast. Sinners did wrong because they enjoyed the sin; but she had never been vicious, or even selfishly anxious for pleasure. Pleasure! She had never cared for that sort of thing. Girls of her own age used to talk to her about it, and what they said was almost incomprehensible. She had never had such feelings, however faintly.

No, her only fault had been in giving way to the people who had charge of her, and who were too strong to be resisted. Just at first she had been flattered and pleased when Mr. Barradine had begun to take notice of her--patting her, and holding her hand, and saying he admired her hair; but she had not in the least known where all this was leading. What she told Will was substantially correct as to the beginning--but of course her eyes had been opened before anything definite occurred. Then she had told Auntie that she was afraid; and then it was that Auntie ought to have saved her, and didn't. Far from it. Auntie, who in early days had been severe enough, now became all smiles, treating her deferentially, saying: "If you play your cards properly you'll set us all up as large as towers. Don't lose your head. For goodness' sake, don't be wild and foolish, and go offending him so that instead of coming back again he'll look elsewhere."

Then later, when she had, as it were, sacrificed herself on the family altar, she was indignant at finding that he had nevertheless looked elsewhere. There were others--and she said she would never forgive him. Yet she did forgive him. Finally, there came the outrage of his stopping at the Cottage with somebody else. Her aunt had sent her out of the way, but she heard of it; and this time she determined to be done with Mr. Barradine. And yet again she forgave him.

Then she discovered, without any explanations, that _he_ had done with her. He was paternal and kind, but she had become just nobody; and her aunt was very angry, saying that she had played her cards badly instead of well. That was about the time that Dale had been two years at Portsmouth. She liked Dale from the first because he was honest and good, and because he seemed to offer her an escape from an extremely difficult position. But if she had been a nasty girl, she would not have made such a marriage; instead of being anxious to secure respectability, however humble, she would have followed Auntie's suggestions and looked out for another protector instead of for a husband. And she had wanted to tell Dale the whole truth; but there again she had been overruled. Auntie forbade her to utter a whisper or hint of it; she said that Mr. Barradine would never pardon such a betrayal of his confidence, whereas if a properly discreet silence were preserved he would give the bride a suitable wedding present, as well as push the fortunes of the bridegroom. "Besides," said Aunt Petherick, "a nice hash you'll make of it if you go and label yourself damaged goods before you're fairly started. Why, it would be just giving Dale the whip-hand over you for the rest of your days." Looking back at it all, Mavis felt that this argument was irrefutable.

After marriage she began to love Will most truly and devotedly--but not for his embraces, which did not even stir her pulses, which only made her tenderly happy that she could make him happy. Now after eleven years her feeling toward him was all unselfish and beautiful, a gentle and deep affection, without a taint of anything that one would not call really _lady-like_. The passion and boisterousness were all on his side.

And thinking of things that she had never told Will, she wondered if this calmness of temperament, or perhaps unusual failure in response, was but another fatal consequence of the Barradine slavery. If so, what cause she had to hate and curse him! The episode with him was simply an irksomeness: it had frozen her instead of warming her, checked her expansion, and perhaps, breaking the cycle of normal development, made her imperfect as a woman.

Perhaps this was the real reason why she had remained childless. She represented completed womanhood in this respect at least, that she desired to be a mother. The possession of children was the one thing that made her envious of other women. The idea of having a child of her own made her almost faint with longing--a baby to nurse, a little burden to wheel about in a perambulator, a companion to prattle to her all day while Will was busy down-stairs. If the hope of such joy had been taken from her by Mr. Barradine, oh, how immeasureably great was her cause for hatred!

She sat staring at the distant point where he and his horse had just now vanished, and for a little while her thoughts were like curses. Any attributes of grandeur were transitory illusions; he was wholly mean and base: he was the embodied principle of evil that had spoiled the past and that still threatened the future. She wished that he might eventually suffer as much as he had made her suffer. She wished that he might be racked with rheumatism, burned up with gout, tortured with every conceivable painful disease. She wished him dead and crumbling to dust in his coffin.

After tea she came back to the window and stayed there till nightfall.

Little by little the street became dim and vague. Two or three futile oil lamps were lighted, and the shop fronts shone brightly, but all the rest grew dark, like a river or a canal instead of a street. One heard voices, and then people showed themselves momentarily as they passed through the lamplight.

While she watched them passing, her thoughts drifted into generalized sadness.

The shutters went up at the saddler's, and she saw Mr. Allen for a moment--a long, thin man, looking too tall for the frame of the lamplit doorway. Mr. Allen used to have a fine business but he was spoiling it by his folly. It had been his custom to go to neighboring meets of hounds and ask the young gentlemen if the saddles he had made for them were satisfactory, insinuate his fingers between saddle-tree and hunter's withers to see if there was plenty of room, and generally render himself obsequiously agreeable. That was good for trade. But then the hunting gradually fascinated him, and he followed on foot throughout the season, halloaing hounds to wrong foxes, standing on banks and frightening horses, being a nuisance to the gentlemen, and coming home to boast that although he was fifty he had walked twenty-seven miles in the day. And his trade was all going or gone, and he not seeming to care. His wife let lodgings to make up a bit. Very sad.

Candle-light showed in a window of the house next door to the saddler's, and Mavis thought of these neighbors--two sisters, old maids--who had a very, very little money of their own and who endeavored to add to what was barely enough for necessities by selling butterfly nets, children's fishing-rods, stamp albums, and picture post-cards. Two years ago the elder sister tumbled down-stairs and injured her spine; and since then she had been bedridden, lying in the upper room at the back of the house, with nothing to amuse her but a view of the graveyard behind the church. Mavis had been to see her one day this summer, had sat by the bed, and read her a chapter out of the New Testament and then the weekly instalment of a novel in the _Rodhaven District Courier_. Extremely sad.

Then livid-faced, matty-haired Emily Frayne passed by, carrying a brown-paper parcel. This poor overworked girl was the only daughter of Frayne the tailor, who was a confirmed drunkard. All day long she was kept toiling like a slave, cutting out, beginning and finishing gaiters, breeches, and stable-jackets, doing all the work that was ever done at Frayne's; and at night she went round trying to get orders, delivering the goods that she had completed, and being forced to support the impudence and familiarity of coachmen and grooms, who chucked her under the chin and said they'd give her a kiss for her pains because they weren't flush enough to stand her a drink. All painfully sad.

There was a dreadful lot of tippling at Rodchurch: in fact, one might say that drink was the prevailing fault of the village. The vicar publicly touched on the matter in his sermons, and privately he often said that Mr. Cope, the fat landlord of The Gauntlet Inn, was greatly to blame. The tradesmen had a little club at the Gauntlet, where Cope employed a horrid brazen barmaid who sometimes sang comic songs to the club members. Mrs. Cope felt strongly about the barmaid, and quite took the vicar's side in the dispute the day that Cope came out of the tap-room and was so rude and abusive to the reverend gentleman. Mrs. Cope said she'd be glad if Mr. Norton brought her husband to book before the magistrates and got his license taken away.

Dale openly expressed contempt for this boozing Gauntlet club, refused to take up his membership when elected, and had received a complimentary letter from the vicar thanking him for the fine example he had set for others. No, dear old Will, though he liked his glass of beer as well as anybody, would often go a whole week on tea and coffee; and she thought what a merit his sobriety had been. Merely considered as economy, it was a blessing. It is always the drink, and never the food, that runs away with one's household money.

Mr. Silcox the tobacconist hurried through the lamplight, unquestionably on his way to the Gauntlet. Silcox was a chattering foolish creature who had lost his own and his widowed mother's savings in a ridiculous commercial enterprise--a promptly bankrupt theater company over at Rodhaven--and it was thought that the workhouse would be the end for him and Mrs. Silcox. But early this summer people had been startled by hearing that the _Courier_ had appointed Silcox as their reporter; and local critics were of opinion that Silcox had taken very kindly to literature, and that he was shaping well, and might perhaps retrieve the past in making name and fortune. Dale, who used to chaff Silcox rather heavily, was at present quite polite to him. It had always been Will's policy to stand well with the press, and there was no doubt that during the recent controversy Silcox had endeavored to render aid with his pen.

Lamplight moving now--a cart coming down. Mavis, peering out, saw that it was old Mr. Bates again, in a gig this time, going home to his pretty little farm two miles off on the Hadleigh Road. Fancy his being still at it so late, only finishing the day's work long after so many younger men had done. Mr. Bates was reputed rich--a highly respected person; but the sorrow of his old age was a bad, bad son. Richard Bates raced, and habitually ran after women--that is, when he possessed the use of his legs and was able to run. But he was a heavy drinker, and it was no unusual thing for the helpers at the Roebuck stables to have to get out a conveyance at closing time and drive Richard, speechless, motionless, to Vine-Pits Farm. He never went to the Gauntlet, but always to the Roebuck--beginning the evening in the hotel billiard-room, trying to swagger it out at pool with the solicitor and the doctor, then drifting to the stable bar, and finishing the evening there, or outside in the open yard. One could imagine the feelings of the old father, waiting up all alone, knowing from experience what the sound of wheels implied after ten o'clock. Will said once that he believed Mr. Bates was glad Mrs. Bates hadn't been spared to see it.

And Mavis, moving at last from the window, thought that she was not the only sad inhabitant of Rodchurch. There is a cruel lot of sorrow in most people's lives.

IX

The second week of the fortnight was passing much quicker than the first week. By a most happy inspiration Mavis had hit upon a means of filling the dull empty time. On Tuesday morning she told Mary that they would turn the master's absence to good account by giving the house an unseasonal but complete spring cleaning, and ever since then they had both been hard at work.

The work gave exercise as well as occupation; it furnished a ready excuse for declining to go over and see Mrs. Petherick or to allow a visit from her; and, moreover, it had a satisfactory calming effect on one's nerves. While Mavis was reviewing pots and pans, standing on the high step-ladder to unhook muslin curtains, and, most of all, while she was going through her husband's winter underclothes in search of moths, it seemed to her that she was not only retaining but strengthening her hold on all these inanimate friends, and that they themselves were eloquently though dumbly protesting against the mere idea of forcible separation. When she sat down, hot and tired, in the midst of shrouded masses of furniture, to enjoy a picnic meal that Mary had set out on the one unoccupied corner of a crowded table, she was able to eat with hearty appetite; and yet, no matter how tired she might be by the end of the day, she could not sleep properly at night.

If she slept, a dream of trouble woke her. As she lay awake her trouble sometimes seemed greater than ever. It was as though the spring cleaning, which by day proved mentally beneficial, became deleterious during these long night watches. The neater, the cleaner, the brighter she made her home, the more terrible must be a sentence of perpetual banishment.

On Friday afternoon the work was nearly over. Kitchen utensils were like shining mirrors; the flowers of the best carpet were like real blossoms budding after rain; and Mavis on the step-ladder, with a smudged face, untidy hair, and grimy hands, had begun to reinstate the pictures handed to her by Mary, when Miss Yorke came knocking abruptly at the parlor door.

"A telegram, ma'am."

"All right."

Mavis had come down the ladder, and as she opened the yellow envelope she began to tremble.

"Answer paid, ma'am. Shall I wait?"

"No. I--I'll--No, don't wait."

It was from Dale. She had sat down on the lowest step of the ladder, and was trembling violently. "Oh, how dreadful!" She muttered the words mechanically, without any attempt to express her actual thought. "How very dreadful!"

"What is it, ma'am? Bad news?"

"Oh, most dreadful. But perhaps a mistake. I'm to find out;" and she stared stupidly at the paper that was shaking in her fingers. Then, spreading it on her lap, she read the message aloud:--

"Evening paper says fatal accident to Mr. Barradine. Is this true? Wire Dale, Appledore Temperance Hotel, Stamford Street, S.E."

Then she jumped up, ran into the front room, and looked out of the window. A glance showed her that the village was in possession of some sensational tidings. There was a knot of people standing in front of the saddler's, and another--quite a little crowd--in front of the butcher's; all were talking excitedly, nodding their heads, and gesticulating.

She ran down-stairs and joined the group at the saddler's.

"I never cared for the look of the horse," Allen was saying sententiously. "And I might almost claim to have warned them--no longer ago than last March. The stud-groom was riding him at a meet, and I said, 'Mr. Yeatman, you aren't surely going to let Mr. Barradine risk his neck with hounds on that thing?' 'No,' he said, 'Mr. Barradine has bought him for hacking.' 'Oh,' I said, 'hacking and hunting are two things, of course, but--'"

Then somebody interrupted.

"Chestnut horse, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Allen, "one of these thoroughbred weeds, without a back that you can fit with to anything bigger than a racing saddle; and I've always maintained the same thing. A bit of blood may do very well for young gentlemen, but to go and put a gentleman of Mr. Barradine's years--"

"Mind you," interposed a Roebuck stableman, "Mr. Barradine liked 'em gay. Mr. Barradine was a horseman!"

Mr. Barradine _liked_ gay horses. Mr. Barradine _was_ a horseman. That tremendous sound of the past tense answered the question that Mavis was breathlessly waiting to ask.

"Shocking bad business, isn't it, Mrs. Dale?"

She did not reply; but nobody noticed her silence or agitation. They all went on talking; and she only thought: "He is dead. He is dead. He is dead." She was temporarily tongue-tied, awestricken, full of a strange superstitious horror.

Presently Allen spoke to her again. "There'll never be such another kind gentleman in _our_ times, Mrs. Dale; nor one so open-handed. And it's not only the gentry that's going to mourn him. The pore hev lost a good friend."

"Yes," she whispered. "Indeed they have. Indeed they have."

Miss Waddy came out of her absurd little post-card shop and kept saying, "Oh, dear!" She, like almost everybody else in the village except Mavis Dale and Mary, had known the news for hours; but she was greedy for the more and more particularized information that every newcomer brought with him along the road from Manninglea.

"How was the body taken to the Abbey?"

"Sent one of the carriages."

"Oh, dear!"

They continued to talk; and Mavis, listening, for a few moments felt gladness, nothing but gladness. He had gone out of their lives forever. There could be no divorce. Now that he was dead, she would be forgiven. Then again she felt the horror of it. The thing was like an answer to her secret prayer or wish--like the mysterious overwhelming consequence of her curse. It was as though in cursing him she had doomed him to destruction.

"They caught the horse last night, didn't they?"

"Yes. Some chaps at Abbey Cross Roads see un go gallopin' by, and followed un up Beacon Hill. Catched un in the quag by th' old gravel pits."

"Oh, dear!" said Miss Waddy.